Page 179 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 14

Journalism, Climate Communication

and Media Alternatives

Robert A. Hackett and Shane Gunster

To the extent that journalism influences public agendas and remains
modernity’s most important form of storytelling, what kind of journalism
could help humanity address climate crisis with the necessary urgency and
openness to radical change?
A review of academic, professional and NGO literature on ‘best prac-
tices’ in environmental journalism identified multiple aspects of traditional
reporting methods that could be revamped, including training, variability
of topics, range of information and sources, balance and objectivity,
newsworthiness and storytelling methods (Bourassa et al. 2013). While
many proposals associated with these themes are worthy, they are too often
disconnected from each other, and too modest in scope to supersize
audience engagement with climate politics. Moreover, they often run
counter to the anti-environmental logics of commercial news media, linked
to corporate ownership, financial and fossil fuel capital, and consumerist
culture. In much of the global North, newsrooms are economically
imploding under the weight of debt, technological change and conglom-
erate disinvestment in journalism.
In this chapter, we suggest several more encompassing options for cli-
mate journalism—the (re)framing of climate politics by environmental

R.A. Hackett (&) S. Gunster
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
e-mail: hackett@sfu.ca

© The Author(s) 2017 173
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_14